Factorio is a bad railroad simulator because you cannot do grade separation (bridges or tunnels). This means all of your rail networks are artificially limited to being planar graphs which kills your throughput.
OpenTTD allows grade separation at least but imho is inferior to Simutrans which ensures cargo and passengers have destinations and will not use your network unless you can path them to their destination.
Because OpenTTD doesn't have this it devolves into forcing cargo or people to travel the longest possible distance for the most money, instead of to where they actually want to go.
Simutrans-extended is something I'm really hyped for because the simulation of passenger desires is even more in-depth than the original.
Cargodist isn't the same as what I'm describing. It creates destinations for cargo and passengers based on the existing network you have. In other words, "demand" is changed to fit your playstyle.
In regular Simutrans, passengers want to go to a specific destination regardless of whether your network allows them to go there. This means you have to change your playstyle to fit what passengers want to do, since otherwise, people won't take trips.
I believe Simutrans handles this better. If you're someone who wants to go to Europe but the only plane ticket you can buy is to South America, you won't take that trip (Simutrans model). But in OpenTTD, passenger demand is basically "yeah I just want to go somewhere" and then you deliver them to Antarctica. Cargodist means that if you now offer service to Greenland, they'll evenly distribute themselves between Antarctica and Greenland.
I'm more of a product-minded person so I prefer Simutrans. Demand is the constant I want to optimize around; I don't want demand to be optimized around my transport network. But this also creates a much more difficult game.
The linked article of the other person (about cargodist) says it distiguishes itself from an opentd extention called YACD which seems to be more what you are suggesting.
Factorio is a bad railroad simulator because it is was never designed to be a railroad simulator. This has only a little bit to do with the respective grade-levels of crossings (because, I mean, many, many very functional rail networks actually-operate on Earth using only flat crossings, because the terrain is flat where these networks are built).
One way in that vanilla Factorio is a shit simulation is that it cannot couple and decouple cars. Trains are built by hand, and then those trains remain as they are until remogrified by hand.
Want to send coal/copper/iron/something (or a combination of things) somewhere else? Cool beans! People do this every day in the real world.
In the real world, cars are often left in yards and sidings to be swapped around and loaded by switchers and other mechanisms while the locomotive that delivered these cars has departed -- probably along with a train of other cars that this station isn't interested in.
In Factorio, one lets trains fill up with things at A (according to rules), and then it goes from A to B and unload those things at B (according to rules).
Stops for C, D, and E can be added, but even if they are: The whole train (including locomotives) stays coupled together together and there isn't any other way to do it.
The locomotive is always waiting unless it is travelling with the entirety of its assigned cars. The trains are completely inflexible.
Real-world train networks don't work that way. Got 50 containers to load up? Drop off 50 appropriate cars to be loaded up, and move on to the next problem while that station deals with putting containers onto cars. And at that next station, load up on already-full tankers. And then to the next station where a bunch of new Fords are dropped off in segments of TTX transport cars.
Factorio is also a shit simulation because these fixed-unit trains have a predefined route: Not only can cars not be picked up or dropped off, no station can offer things and no other station can order things. In Factorio, if there is iron to deliver: The usual method is to pick up as much iron as will fit on this inflexible train (however long that takes), and take it to station B to unload (however long that takes): It's a neat way to approximate how a belt works in Factorio over a longer distance, but it is not a simulation of how rail actually works.
It's a fun game and I love playing it, but it's not a fucking rail simulator[1]. Very few aspects of Factorio's rail system resemble actual rail systems in the real world that actually exists.
(Actually, while I'm at it: Factorio isn't a simulator of anything. Just because it is a fun game does not mean that it has to be a simulation of...anything.)
I can't stand it because of the insanely low built in fixed framerate. It's something weird like 20fps. UI responsiveness is also terrible for the same reason, because everything is apparently spaghetti coded together and the game logic is tied to the framerate.
Factorio's railroads are so fun to build and play with. Add a circuit network and robots to the mix, and you have yourself endless hours of enjoyment. I eagerly anticipate the release of 2.0 this fall.
Clearly you folks haven't tried playing A-Train, a Japanese train tycoon game...
Seriously though, try it out! It's actually one of the best games I've ever played. I'd even say that it's so underrated.
It's a train tycoon game, but also silently focuses on being a real estate simulator, just like how a lot of Japanese companies don't make money primarily on train tickets, but instead real estate or other non-farebox income.
one of my favourite games ever was "railroad tycoon 2"; it was not a particularly deep railway simulator, but it was a superbly immersive treatment of "railroads helped settle a continent". few games achieved that sort of immersive feeling for me, civ 1 and stellaris are the other ones that come to mind.
OpenTTD allows grade separation at least but imho is inferior to Simutrans which ensures cargo and passengers have destinations and will not use your network unless you can path them to their destination.
Because OpenTTD doesn't have this it devolves into forcing cargo or people to travel the longest possible distance for the most money, instead of to where they actually want to go.
Simutrans-extended is something I'm really hyped for because the simulation of passenger desires is even more in-depth than the original.
https://simutrans-germany.com/wiki/wiki/en_extended_Passenge...
The most satisfying rail network for me is one that has both complex form and function.